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Jason Spero, Google's mobile sales and strategy chief.

Jason Spero, head of global mobile sales and strategy at Google, is, as you’d expect, keen on describing how mobility is transforming everything – users daily lives, businesses, advertising and marketing – and even Google itself.

"It’s a really significant change for Google and for our customers because it’s a significant change at a company that has been really good at [the] desktop,” Spero said in a recent interview. “And there’s top down support that every device will eventually have a GPS chip and every device will have the benefits of mobility. Mobility is a massive driver of change. That has been driven through the product and engineering teams. We’re at the very beginning, but a long road to go."

Google took a giant step forward on that road when it announced this week some of the biggest changes ever to its AdWords ad system, which is responsible for the majority of its revenue. Forbes contributor Rob Hof, who describes the AdWords update in detail, says Google is rolling out what it calls enhanced campaigns to help marketers–especially small and medium-sized businesses with few resources to devise complex campaigns–to reach people wherever they are more easily than they can now…The most obvious outcome for Google is that it’s likely to see many more businesses bidding for mobile ad placement. increasing competition in Google’s auction-based system, and therefore raising prices.”

I asked Spero, a former AdMob executive who joined Google when it acquired the company in May 2010, about mobile and the company's multi-screen view of the world — where users move seamlessly between smartphones, tablets, PCs and other devices. Here are excerpts from our conversation. Here are excerpts from our Jan. 28 conversation.

Q: In a March 2011 talk about mobile, you said the rise in smartphones is changing how we as consumers shop, communicate and “interact with our environment around us.” You said it’s the difference between “going online” and “being online” and that 1 in 3 searches are being done with “local intent.”

My story hasn’t changed very much at all. We’re still very excited about the idea of consumer behavior and understanding it better with regard to mobile context. The big change in my vocabularly is that I’m talking less about the device and more about mobile context.

Q: And that means?

[Many] thought about a mobile device as being used for out-and-about behavior, while a tablet is about home on the couch and desktop is about a lot of things. What we’ve learned is that we’re seeing mobility in all these places we didn’t. We’re calling that context.

Q: What are the new contexts?

Before I compared mobile to tablet. Now I would compare out-and-about to at home on a weekday evening. The way I would know that is the amount of IP activity. I’m starting with, Can we understand discrete patterns? We see context as a function of location, proximity, time and the capabilities of the device in my hand.

Q: Can you give me an example?

[There are] differences in behavior if I’m out and about in a downturn, urban area. That’s location. With proximity, am I out and about and certain distances from airports, retail stores? The third one is time and day. Is it the day of the week that makes a difference? 3 p.m. on a weekday is very different from 3 p.m. on a weekend. We’re seeing distinct patterns on time of day.

If you combine that with the capabilities of the device in my hand, we can be smarter about the experiences we offer people.

Q: You mentioned Priceline as an example of someone who is getting the context.

With Priceline, they found that roughly 80-plus percent of reservations were happening within one day of stay. Two-thirds were in within 20 miles and one-third were in 1-mile of [the user’s location]. What you see from the Priceline example is the importance of place and time…What mobility is particularly good for is proximity of time and proximity of place challenges.

We think this is a shift in targeting – how and when you engage – and it’s a shift in experience.

Broadly, you want to have a plan as a marketer. If you’re a retailer, there may be times and locations when you want to drive people into your store. And other times when you want them to go to your site…All of those are new marketing goals we think we can accomplish with this idea of location, proximity and time.

Q: So what are you telling your advertisers and marketers about how to take advantage of this? I know that last year you released The Mobile Playbook, a sort of how-to guide for companies interested in the mobile opportunity. What are you telling them this year?

First, you have to think multi-screen. And crafting the experiences for both the devices and the times of the day. An example: If we see someone searching on the term pizza in the evening, with certain device capabilities, we’re probably going to offer them solutions with pizza deliveries. If we see someone searching around pizza is at 1 in the afternoon, they probably want to go to the place and eat the pizza...